Web and software development for UAE businesses
The UAE is the easiest overseas market we serve, for one arithmetic reason: Gulf Standard Time is ninety minutes behind India. Your working day sits almost entirely inside ours, which makes an offshore engagement feel like a local one.
Dubai and Abu Dhabi buy technology rather than build it. The region has enormous digital spend, a genuine government mandate to digitise, and comparatively little local development capacity, which means almost everything is delivered by someone outside the country. Indian studios have been the default answer to that for twenty years, and the reason is not only cost.
It is the clock. A UAE business working with a team in India operates in near real time. Compare that with a London or New York client of an Indian supplier, who is managing a five to ten hour gap and structuring everything around it. In Dubai you can call us at eleven in the morning and we answer. That single fact removes most of what makes offshore engagements difficult.
The second thing that makes this market straightforward is that a large share of UAE business owners are Indian-origin and already understand Indian delivery. They are not evaluating whether the model works. They are evaluating whether this particular supplier is any good, which is a much better conversation to be having.
What follows covers what we cost in dirhams, how the federal data protection law and the free-zone regimes differ, and what we will not claim. We have no UAE trade licence, no office and no local representative, and we say so plainly rather than listing a Business Bay address we have never occupied.
The ninety-minute advantage, stated properly
Gulf Standard Time is UTC+4. Indian Standard Time is UTC+5:30. There is no daylight saving in either, so the gap is a constant ninety minutes, year-round, with no shift to manage.
Our working day of 09:30 to 19:30 IST is 08:00 to 18:00 in Dubai. That is not an overlap window, it is your entire working day. Whatever hour you need us, we are at our desks.
The practical consequences are larger than they sound. Daily standups happen at a normal hour for both sides. A bug found at ten in the morning is being worked on by five past. Design review happens live rather than through three rounds of written comments. Your own developers can pair with ours. None of that is possible with a five-hour gap and all of it is routine here.
The one thing to plan for is the working week rather than the clock. The UAE runs Monday to Friday with a half-day Friday in the public sector, while we work Monday to Saturday. In practice that means we are available on Saturdays when you are not, which most clients treat as a bonus rather than a problem.
In practice
Every engagement starts with a conversation, not a proposal template.
Thirty minutes with a senior engineer. You leave with an architecture sketch and an honest cost range, whether or not you hire us.
What we cost in dirhams
UAE agency rates are high, driven by office costs in Dubai and salaries that have to compete with the region’s wider employment market. These are indicative bands for original work with us.
On VAT
We invoice from India, so UAE VAT is not charged on our fees. As a VAT-registered UAE business you may have reverse-charge obligations on imported services, which your accountant should confirm. We are not UAE tax advisers and will not pretend to be.
| Project | Typical UAE agency | With us | Timeline |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small business site, 6-12 pages | AED 15,000 - 40,000 | AED 2,300 - 5,500 | 4-6 weeks |
| Corporate site with CMS | AED 40,000 - 120,000 | AED 5,500 - 18,000 | 8-14 weeks |
| eCommerce storefront | AED 35,000 - 150,000 | AED 4,500 - 22,000 | 6-14 weeks |
| ERP or internal business system | AED 150,000 - 700,000 | AED 20,000 - 150,000 | 4-12 months |
| Custom web application | AED 120,000 - 550,000 | AED 15,000 - 130,000 | 3-12 months |
| Maintenance and support | AED 2,500 - 8,000/mo | AED 350 - 1,800/mo | Retained |
Federal PDPL, DIFC and ADGM: which regime applies to you
The UAE has more than one data protection regime and which one governs your engagement depends on where your entity sits. This catches out suppliers who assume there is a single answer.
Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021 is the onshore regime, overseen by the UAE Data Office. It follows GDPR principles closely: lawful basis, purpose limitation, data minimisation and conditions on cross-border transfer.
If your entity is in the Dubai International Financial Centre or Abu Dhabi Global Market, a separate regime applies. Both are mature, closely modelled on European practice, and in several respects more developed than the federal law. The contractual instruments differ and so do the obligations, so tell us at the outset which applies rather than discovering it during procurement.
For most of the work we do the cleanest answer is to avoid the transfer question entirely. If we do not need production personal data to build what you have asked for, we should not have it. We develop against anonymised or synthetic datasets by default and restrict production access to named individuals under logged conditions where it is genuinely required.
None of this is legal advice. Your compliance adviser should review any arrangement involving personal data.
Every engagement starts with a conversation, not a proposal template.
Thirty minutes with a senior engineer. You leave with an architecture sketch and an honest cost range, whether or not you hire us.
Where our experience fits the UAE economy
The UAE economy is dominated by trading, logistics, real estate and hospitality, with a manufacturing base concentrated in Sharjah and the northern emirates. Our experience transfers unevenly across that and it is more useful to say where than to claim general capability.
Trading and distribution businesses are the strongest fit. A Dubai trading company running on spreadsheets, with stock across three warehouses, credit terms that vary by customer and invoicing that takes days, has exactly the problem we have solved repeatedly for Indian distributors. The commercial patterns are near-identical.
Real estate and property is the second, where the work is portals, listing platforms and the integration between a CRM and whatever the agency uses for contracts and commissions.
Hospitality and tourism is the third, and the commercial case is usually aggregator commission: a direct booking channel good enough that guests prefer it recovers a meaningful share of what you currently pay to platforms.
Where we would advise caution: anything requiring detailed knowledge of UAE regulatory filing, free-zone compliance procedure or Arabic-first content design. We build to a specification; someone who knows those should write it.
Every engagement starts with a conversation, not a proposal template.
Thirty minutes with a senior engineer. You leave with an architecture sketch and an honest cost range, whether or not you hire us.
What we will not claim
A great many offshore suppliers list a Dubai address they have never occupied, usually a virtual office or a desk in a shared space, in order to appear in local search results and look established. It is common enough in this market that you should assume it until shown otherwise.
We have no UAE trade licence, no office and no local representative. Every engineer is in Kolkata. We will not register a Business Bay address to rank in Google Maps, because it would be a policy violation and a misrepresentation to you.
What we will claim is checkable. We invoice in dirhams. Your working day sits inside ours. We sign your data protection terms rather than requiring our own. And we will tell you when we are the wrong supplier, which most often applies where a project genuinely requires someone on the ground or a UAE-registered counterparty for procurement reasons.
If a local trade licence is a hard requirement for your procurement process, we cannot meet it, and we would rather establish that in the first conversation than at contract stage.
Every engagement starts with a conversation, not a proposal template.
Thirty minutes with a senior engineer. You leave with an architecture sketch and an honest cost range, whether or not you hire us.
3 markets, each with a different problem
These are not the same page with the place name swapped. The industries, the buying pattern and the work we are asked for differ materially between them, which is why each has its own.
The commercial centre of the region and the densest concentration of SMEs, trading companies and free-zone entities anywhere in the Gulf. Decisions move quickly, expectations on turnaround are high, and the buyer is frequently an owner rather than a committee.
The capital and the seat of government, energy and sovereign wealth. Slower, more formal and considerably larger in deal size than Dubai, with procurement processes that resemble a European enterprise more than a Gulf trading house.
The industrial and manufacturing emirate, with a far higher density of factories, workshops and family-run trading businesses than Dubai, and markedly smaller budgets. This is where our Indian industrial experience transfers most directly in the UAE.
What United Arab Emirates clients buy from us
The same engineering we do for Indian clients, quoted in UAE dirhams and structured around the time difference.
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Enquiries now arrive with specifications already attached
Our previous website had a stock photograph and a paragraph about commitment to quality. It brought us nothing in four years. Sayak spent two days on our shop floor before drawing anything, and what they built lists our machine capacities, tolerance ranges and certifications in a way a purchasing officer can actually evaluate. The change was not in the number of enquiries so much as in their quality — people now call having already decided we can do the job, so the conversation starts at commercial terms.
They talked us out of half of what we asked for
We went in with a long list of features we were certain we needed. They built roughly half of it and explained clearly why the rest would be maintained forever and used by nobody. Six months on they were right about every item. The store is fast on phones, which matters because that is where almost all of our traffic comes from, and our team updates the catalogue ourselves without calling anyone.
Parallel running for a full month meant nobody had to trust it blind
Replacing a system a clinic depends on is frightening, and most vendors we spoke to proposed a weekend cutover. Sayak ran the new system alongside our registers for a full month and only switched once the numbers matched every day. Our front desk staff were part of the design rather than being trained at the end, which is why they actually use it. Report preparation that took a person most of a morning now takes minutes.
What United Arab Emirates buyers ask us
If yours is not here, ask it directly. We would rather tell you we are a poor fit in the first call than in month three.
A corporate website with a CMS typically runs AED 40,000 to 120,000 from a UAE agency and AED 5,500 to 18,000 with us. An ERP or internal system is AED 150,000 to 700,000 locally against AED 20,000 to 150,000. These are indicative bands for original work rather than quotations, and the biggest variable in either case is integration with systems you already run.
Ninety minutes, constant, with no daylight saving on either side. Our working day of 09:30 to 19:30 IST is 08:00 to 18:00 in Dubai, so your entire working day sits inside ours. Daily standups, live code review and pairing are all practical, which is not true of most offshore relationships.
No. We have no UAE trade licence, no office and no local representative, and we will not list a virtual office address to appear in local search results. Every engineer is in Kolkata. If a UAE-registered counterparty is a hard procurement requirement, we cannot meet it and will say so in the first conversation.
It depends where your entity sits. Onshore entities fall under Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021, overseen by the UAE Data Office. Entities in DIFC or ADGM fall under those free zones own regimes, which are closer to European practice and in several respects more developed. Tell us which applies at the outset, because the contractual instruments differ.
No. We invoice from India, so UAE VAT is not charged on our fees. As a VAT-registered UAE business you may have reverse-charge obligations on imported services. Confirm that with your accountant, since it depends on your registration and circumstances. We are not UAE tax advisers.
Yes. You keep the client, the brief and the commercial terms, and we work inside your repository under your conventions and your brand. We do not contact your client during or after the engagement, and that non-solicitation is a contract term. The ninety-minute time difference makes this arrangement considerably easier here than in our UK or Australian agency work.
Tell us what is slowing your business down.
A 30-minute call with a senior engineer — not a salesperson. You leave with an architecture sketch and an honest cost range, whether or not you hire us.
Direct line
+91 70033 91355Mon–Sat · 9:30 AM – 7:30 PM IST · Sealdah, Kolkata